Intel has been testing out the Sandy Bridge for quite some time now, and manufacturers had shown a lot of finalized boards (with no special designs yet of kush) over at Computex in Taiwan last month. But now Intel is brushing up the Sandy Bridge as they prepare for it to hit retails most probably at 1st quarter of next year, replacing the now-aging Nehalem.

The Sandy Bridge is based on 32nm build process, will be using the new LGA1155 socket. Yes that upgrade of yours will cost a lot more, as it’s totally incompatible with your existing LGA1156 or LGA1366 board, which means new boards for your rig.

As for the Sandy Bridge CPUs, they’re going to be Intel’s first chips to integrate the CPU and GPU on a single piece of silicon – the current LGA1156 chips have a GPU on the same package as the CPU but they’re two bits of silicon – like the AMD Fusion chip we just saw.

Intel will still be sticking to the successful Core™ branding of theirs. But the new Sandy Bridge will be utilizing a new 4-digit naming sequence, for example Core i3-2100 or Core i5-2500. Rumored code name for the finalized Sandy Bridge processors has already surfaced on the net.

Core i7 2600: Quad-Core processor with Hyper-Threading, 3.2 GHz, 8 MB L3 cache
Core i5 2400: Quad-Core without Hyper-Threading, 3,1 GHz, 6 MB L3 cache
Core i5 2500: Quad-Core without Hyper-Threading, 3,3 GHz, 6 MB L3 cache
Core i3 2100: Dual-Core with Hyper-Threading, 3.1 GHz, 3 MB L3 cache
Core i3 2120: Dual-Core with Hyper-Threading, 3.3 GHz, 3 MB L3 cache

[via xfastest]